All posts by earlwillis

The photo appeared on the front page of the newspaper’s Monday edition with the headline, “Kiwi killed in Gaza.” The image was meant to be of Staff Sgt. Guy Boyland, who died in a firefight with Hamas gunmen in Gaza on Friday. Instead, it showed the American comedian who died in a car crash in 2011.

How to fix “Firefox is already running” error

Sometimes when I try to start Firefox, it warns me that Firefox is already running. The message looks like this:

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.

Usually, you can just kill the firefox process to solve this problem. For example, on Linux the command “ps auxwww | grep firefox” will find the process number and then “kill [processnumber]” will work fine.

If none of that worked, try killall [processname]. Example to kill Firefox

I recently came across this error when trying to install Virtual Box on my Mac. It usually happens when you have a failed import, or you remove a VM and try to re-install. It wasn’t too intuitive trying to figure this out but here it is:

1. First go to Virtual Box Media Manager and Unmount the VM.

Navigate to folder \\Users\[you]\VirtualBox VMs\VirtualBox VM and delete all content in this folder.

Someone had contacted me yesterday about how to take screenshots in Selenium. There are tons of advantages of doing this. First, you can run a job anytime you want, have it visit every page on the website, and review the screenshots for obvious bugs. Second, we can insert screenshots at breaking points, or during any function.

The dreaded problem from what I’ve seen scouring the Internet is how to take screenshots in the Microsoft IE family.

Many have gotten success from using the following code in Firefox and have wondered how to get it work across IE:

First, a lot of things have not worked for me. I’ve tried SnapsIE but I wouldn’t go this route as SnapsIE (The latest snapsie-0.2.) is no longer being actively developed and the last update was in 2008. I tried registering the DLL in IE 9/10 and wasn’t able to get it to work. I can only imagine this would be of no purpose if it only worked in older browsers. Hell, IE8 came out March 19, 2009; so SnapeIE last update was almost a year before. I did not check if this worked for IE8.

captureScreenshot()
This method works in FF an IE but the big problem is that it only takes a screenshot of the content within the screen view. Not too useful if you want the full page.

captureEntirePageScreenshot()
This method does not work either in IE at all; so this is pretty much a useless command for IE screen shots.

Anyway, let’s get to it.
Due to Selenium limitations, you want to user WebDriver to so this because WebDriver makes direct calls to the browser using each browser’s native support for automation. That’s key here. Selenium-RC worked the same way for each supported browser. It ‘injected’ javascript functions into the browser when the browser was loaded and then used its javascript to drive the AUT within the browser. This causes many problems so let’s utilize Webdriver’s powerful capabilities instead.

So, first thing you want to do is download Internet Explorer Driver. The InternetExplorerDriver is a standalone server which implements WebDriver’s wire protocol. This driver has been tested with IE 6, 7, 8 and 9 on appropriate combinations of XP, Vista and Windows 7. Get the download here. https://code.google.com/p/selenium/downloads/list

Add this exe file to your PATH variable on your Windows machine.

If you need help doing this, please send me an IM.

Once you’ve added this .exe file to your PATH variable, you’re all ready to go.

Try the following code in your test script and Run as a JUnit Test/Ant build, etc.; however you have your scripts set up.

This should work for you in the all the IE browsers that I’ve listed above.

If you’re sick to your stomach of trying this, there’s a pretty cool tool you can find here which will do it manually for you. It works similar to the existing screenshot plug-ins that are available for Chrome and Firefox. But in IE. However, this little manual plug-in did not worked in all the IE’s except in IE 10.

I got around to doing my taxes today at H&R Block. I went to the one on the UWS because I read somewhere that that particular office got rave reviews for their service and their knowledgeable tax reps. After my taxes were done, they indeed did a terrific job and I was pretty pleased. I had to cancel a few times to come in and they didn’t get all bent out of shape like my dentist does so extra points for them. I was thinking they would apply a fee to my refund and this was somewhere in the fine print for people who don’t cancel in time. Good for me, this wasn’t the case.

They even sent me a nice email saying some pretty good customer-based stuff. I however noticed, and it was the first thing I read right in the salutation, that they had made a label error. I don’t think anyone or any copy editor scripts a formal letter that starts off with; Dear [First Name-Earl] [Middle Initial-A].

Something tells me they wanted the salutation to be in the format of either:

my first name only

my first name and last name

my first name middle initial and last name

My first name

You can see where I’m going with this. There’s also the problem of the salutation being in all caps. Let’s do some functional testing on those emails and put it through the proofreader.

I was watching DeathWish2 today because I never a chance to see it. There was a scene where Charles just layed down the law, pilfers a hospital ID, and decids to put white out across the name on the badge in an attempt to forge his identity and lay down the law even further.

Here’s to Wite-Out, the no need for a bug database instant copy fixer.

Not too sure why this is multi-purpose.

Odd fact: Wite-out was invented in 1951 by the secretary Bette Nesmith Graham,and mother of Mike Nesmith of The Monkees.